Seven Realities Guys Should Know Before They Open Up Their Relationship
Reality #1: Someone’s Gonna Be Swimming In Offers, But It’s Most Likely Not You.
A lot of guys have this logic:
“This girl’s hitting on me, and I can’t take advantage of that because of my girlfriend.
“Man, I’m missing out on all the sex!
“Therefore, if I open up my relationship, I’ll have all the sex!”
But these guys are forgetting two things:
* Many women engage in this behavior called “flirting,” wherein they enjoy exchanging compliments but don’t necessarily want to have sex with you. (In some cases, they may feel safe flirting with you simply because they know you’re not going to respond.) Too many guys run loose and go, “YEAH! WE CAN HAZ TEH SEX NOW, PEGGY!” and get an answer of, “…um, I actually didn’t want sex, David.”
* In almost any set of people, the woman’s going to get more offers to have sex than the man will.
So these dudes open up their relationship, expecting to be drowned in sex, and then are astonished when they’re left dry on a beach and their girlfriend is out swimming in seas of strange dick.
I’m not saying you won’t get offers – but unless you have a guaranteed party on the hook (and we’ll get to that), you’ll most likely have fewer offers than your girlfriend.
It may be enough to keep you happy. Just don’t expect that opening up this relationship is only going to benefit you.
Reality #2: Hostage Situations Usually Don’t End Well For The Hostage-Taker.
A lot of “opened relationships” look like this:
“There’s Margaret. I want to fuck Margaret. If you don’t let me fuck Margaret, I’m breaking up with you. So can I fuck Margaret?”
That’s not polyamory. That’s fucking someone else at the gunpoint of a shattered relationship.
Which is not to say that you should only try to open up your relationship if your partner has no objections – most partners have some fears, and negotiating through these fears is part of the process. And in the good relationships there’s compromise, and concern, and love.
Or you just drop the hammer and fuck away.
But what often happens in these hostage situations is that, as noted, the girl gets more offers. And in dating other dudes, she discovers that hey, other men are nicer than you.
Weeks later, the balance of power is reversed, and she’s dating three boyfriends and spending all her time out and coming home looking gloriously blissful and the chastened boyfriend says, “Hey, sweetie? Maybe we should slow down on this dating thing…”
Guess how well a girlfriend who’s been roped into this life against her will reacts to that kind of offer?
Be kind in ushering your girlfriend into open relationships. You may need that kindness later.
Reality #3: Rules Are Like Training Wheels. If You Don’t Take ‘Em Off Eventually…
What a lot of couples do is surround Their Precious Love with a lot of rules to guarantee their primacy – “Okay, you don’t sleep over at their house, and you don’t ever go out in public, and I have to be the last person you speak to at night…”
Those are often good ways to start. But your goal should be to get rid of them as soon as possible.
For one thing, newbie couples are prone to thinking that “setting rules” is the same as “setting expectations.” But they’re not. You can set a rule that says, “You can’t see a movie with them together, movies are for us,” and suddenly New Partner takes them to a sports game and you feel jealous. They didn’t break any rules, but the underlying expectation was “Don’t do anything with them I’d want to go to.”
Second, as noted in the example above, the goal of a lot of starter rules is actually secretly to hamper your partner’s ability to have a good time. The goal is to purposely sabotage their dates in some subtle way in order to guarantee loyalty to the “core” relationship – which, in turn, leaves a lot of rule-bound couples going, “Why does no one want to date us?” BECAUSE YOU’VE MADE IT SO IT SUCKS FOR THEM TO DATE YOU. You might as well be monogamous, because nobody fucking wants to chop their way through your sex bureaucracy.
Third, rules are often things that “secondaries” – a term I hate – can’t negotiate. You two are the ruler, they’re the subject. And again, going back to the “You get what you give” aspect of this, that lack of negotiation often leads to overthrowing the dictator, where the person your partner is dating doesn’t give a shit about your happiness because you’ve made it clear you don’t give a shit about theirs. Undermining and overthrows result.
And lastly, everybody fucking hates rules. Rules are something someone else made you do. You may need a few rules in your relationships – “No unsafe sex without prior negotiation with me” is a solid one – but your goal would be to transition into more flexible expectations.
Take me, for example. It takes me at least six months of talking to someone before I can have sex with them, and I have to run those people by my girlfriend and wife for a sanity-check. But that’s not a rule per se, because I agree it’s a good idea. I tend to fall into bed with people too soon, am prone to flare-hot-and-burn-badly relationships, and the six months has become part of my expectation in a relationship.
Nobody’s making me take this time – I’ve come to agree that it’s something that makes my life better. It looks a lot like a rule from the outside, but realistically it’s an expectation on everyone’s end.
Rules are like training wheels. Usually, you want to think about taking them off after awhile.
Reality #4: The One-Penis Policy Is Generally A Sexist Piece of Shit.
I’ve written a rant on the OPP before, but the traditional dude thing of “You can date women but not men” is, in my experience, often the sign of dysfunction.
It winds up being a dysfunction when the guy is threatened by other dicks, and so mandates the woman can’t date people who threaten him. Which is a problem for two reasons:
1) He generally likes the idea of the two-girl threesome, so this is often a selfish way of saying, “Sweetie, your goal in this relationship is to turn me on, not to satisfy yourself. You can have all the sex you want as long as I can masturbate to it, and maybe weasel my way in.”
2) It’s a covertly sexist way of saying, “Women aren’t a threat to my relationship, because two women dating isn’t a real relationship.” Cue intense panic when it turns out his girlfriend is dating a girl and gets attached to her.
I’m not saying the OPP is invariably a piece of shit. I have friends who are homoflexible, and are only legit attracted to this one guy. But that’s the woman’s choice, not covertly made because it’s easier than arguing with the guy that he has no right to be threatened.
There are lots of comments from women who started in an OPP and eventually walked away because, when you stripped the fittings away, it turned out the dude was only comfortable if everything in this relationship was designed to service his needs.
Don’t be that dude.
Reality #5: NRE Will Make Everyone Stupid.
NRE stands for “New Relationship Energy,” and it’s the swoony-happy-they’re-perfect feeling you get when you find someone new.
It also has a habit of destroying relationships.
The reason NRE is so destructive is because in a monogamous relationship, you’re used to giving yourself over to your partner 100%. If you wanna spend all your time texting them and getting the new sex and showing them your favorite movies, well, nobody else is suffering!
In polyamorous relationships, that’s called “neglect.” And if it goes on too long, it damages the core relationship.
And it’s a tough skill to learn. It’s hard, when you’re smooching on a couch in the hottest makeout session in your life, and remembering to keep track of time because you promised you’d be home by 8:00 to make dinner.
But it’s something you gotta learn to do. You made promises? Keep ’em. And if you wanna renegotiate those promises? Great!
But breaking your promises without warning because you’re Having A Good Time and Don’t Wanna Leave It means that you tend to leave relationships behind. Especially when your partner’s sitting at home at an empty table, hungry and angry, calling your phone while you refuse to answer.
NRE is not dangerous in and of itself. NRE is dangerous when you’re so wrapped up in fuzzylove that you can’t be bothered to remember what you said you’d do yesterday.
Learn to pull your head out of those clouds and fulfill your promises. You’ll all be stronger for it.
(And yes, that applies to your girlfriend, too. Everyone gets the NRE bug once in a while.)
Reality #6: Polyamory Sometimes Involves Discomfort.
It is not always easy for me to be home alone, watching reruns, when my wife is out on a date. It’s uncomfortable, and I get a little jealous, and there’s that itch to call up and call it off.
But I don’t.
Because sometimes, polyamory involves being uncomfortable and letting it happen.
Don’t be a doormat, of course. But too many relationships involve people freaking out because they can only handle poly when it’s working for *their* benefit – and the minute they feel sad or insecure or lonely because their partner’s getting the good side of poly, they implode.
Good polyamory is about being fair. And the fairness is that at some point, they were sitting at home alone worried about you, and being generous enough to repay that nervousness with reward.
Reality #7: Not All Relationships Can Survive Being Opened.
Even if you follow all of the guidelines I’ve set above, some people just aren’t meant to be together. A lot of relationships go poly because fuck, they’re falling apart as it is, why not try something new?
Which makes polyamory often like Kitchen Nightmares – people point to Gordon Ramsay being able to rescue only 15% of the restaurants he rehabilitates, but people forget that you don’t call in Gordon Ramsay when your restaurant business is running well.
Opening up any relationship, even a steady one, is a risk. You date other people, find other ways of connecting emotionally, and the result may be they discover more fulfilling methods for them. Or you do for you. Or you find out that only one of you is comfortable in this open relationship.
Or – and this is also a very real possibility – you incorporate these other lessons you’ve learned in your other relationships to make your “core” relationship infinitely stronger.
Which is really what opening up your relationship should become – a way of making you both satisfied. It’s all a complex balance – because yeah, rules are helpful but you don’t want to be bound by rules, generosity is helpful but you don’t want to give everything you need away to be a “good” partner, and jealousy is not a crime but you don’t want to run a relationship based on preventing all jealousy.
It’s a tough set of things to manage. Good luck.
Because I gotta tell you – if you can pull it off, you’ll experience some forms of love that you just can’t get anywhere else, and it is beautiful.
Why Twitter Represents Everything Wrong With America Today
So for the seventh time, Twitter is trying to push its algorithmically-sorted Tweets into users’ timelines – and for the seventh time, Twitter users are angrily yelling, “Having our Tweets in the order they arrive in is a feature! Stop fucking trying to change it! Why do you want to change it?”
The reason they want to change it is a large reason why America doesn’t work well any more.
But first, let’s discuss why Twitter’s feed is a critical issue.
If you’re not familiar with how Facebook posts work – and a lot of you are not – Facebook itself decides what posts you see, based on an internal algorithm that scans each post and determines what’s important. What’s resting at the top of your feed might have been posted three days ago – but it got a lot of comments, or it has buzzwords like “new baby,” or it’s got advertising dollars behind it.
And those algorithms are:
Frequently wrong. I stopped adding friends on Facebook after the third – the fucking third! – time there was a death in a friend’s family, and Facebook’s algorithm decided it wasn’t important. And my friends, who were consumed by the death of their mother and/or husband, naturally assumed that I knew because I was their friend on Facebook. Which led to multitudes of awkward conversations when I met them in person and I said, brightly, “How ya doing?” and they went, “Well, it’s been hard,” and I asked, “Why? What happened?”
Subtly Biased. Hey. Are you liberal? Well, you’re gonna be more liberal on Facebook, because that algorithm is going to pick up on what you like, and it’s going to deposit more liberal news posts in your feed, and you’ll come to believe that the world is way more liberal than it is because Facebook is quietly sanitizing what you want to see.
Smothering Stories of Genuine Interest. Ferguson became a national news story not because any news outlet wanted to pick up on it – they ignored it. But people on Twitter kept posting about it, and because Twitter posts show up in chronological order, if you arrived soon after someone posted on Ferguson, you saw every post. Eventually, enough people chained up interest that CNN and FOX news were forced to cover it. Whereas on Facebook, which decided for you what you’d like, Ferguson waited for weeks before it started to be marked as “of interest,” and even then it only showed it to you if it decided you wanted to know.
Twitter wanting to move to an algorithmically-decided ranking means that it decides what you need to see. And stories like Ferguson will be suppressed – not out of any Illuminati-style pressure, but because algorithms are crap at spotting trends with small data, which means if Ferguson started out small in an algorithmically-determined Twitter, it would very likely stay small. When was the last time you heard of a news story breaking on Facebook that someone didn’t post on Facebook?
And every Twitter user I know wants chronological order. That’s why we show up. It’s messy, and it’s chaotic, but we consider “not having an algorithm decide what we see” to be actually one of Twitter’s greatest strengths…
And Twitter keeps ignoring what we want and keeps trotting out feelers to see if they foist this shitty concept on us. (They’ve backed off this latest time, claiming that ha ha, they never meant to replace chronological order, but that’s what they said before – and yet once again there were reports that they wanted to roll it out. There’s beta users who are seeing it. For a company that doesn’t want to use it, they’re sure putting a lot of work into testing algorithms.)
Now, you may be asking, “Why does Twitter want to alienate its core user base?” And the answer is simple:
They don’t want their user base.
They want Facebook’s.
The problem is that Twitter has a devoted user base, but it’s not growing enough. There’s a lot of people who try Twitter, decide it’s not for them, and wander away. There’s also like a billion people on the Internet, and not all of them want to use Twitter – a service which is, essentially, a global IRC chat.
Now, in a sane market, that would be enough. People would go, “Well, Twitter has millions of deeply engaged users, so how do we optimize this experience for them?” And they’d figured out ways to make Twitter better for the folks who use it, and determine better ways to make cash off a loyal user base, and make a decent profit.
Wall Street does not want decent profits.
Wall Street needs magnificent profits.
And that is a comparatively recent development. There was a time not so long ago (well, the 1970s) where a good business could be run with modest growths, and that was considered to be a worthy investment. There were lots of boring markets that just made constant, steady cash – and more importantly, new businesses could be designed to make boring, steady cash.
The point was not that every business had to engage in a tumorously-rapid expansion to grab all the marketshare – though the ones who could were hot tickets – but that back then, Wall Street understood that some businesses were just not designed for continual, explosive growth.
They don’t now. Particularly in the tech sector. If you’re not expanding, you’re dying.
So Twitter has continually spend its capital in attempts to satisfy users it does not have.
Which isn’t entirely bad – little changes like turning the “Favorite” (which used to mean anything from “Save this link to read later” to “Like” to “I acknowledge you made this reply”) into a heart makes Twitter’s complex interface less confusing for newbies.
But it does mean that Twitter is constantly asking itself the question, “How can we beat Facebook?” And you can’t, with Twitter’s core market. Twitter is designed as an alternative to Facebook – and Facebook is meant for small groups of friends and family to interact with, whereas Twitter is more global.
If Twitter acquired Facebook’s user base, it would lose Twitter’s.
Yet that’s what Wall Street demands, and that’s why Twitter is flailing both on Wall Street and in the public’s eye – its whole financial success is being judged by the question of “Well, how big is this going to get? Is it going to beat Facebook? Then it sucks.”
Twitter’s user base is angry that Twitter is ignoring them, and Wall Street is mad that Twitter isn’t ignoring its user base enough.
Which is a problem with America. The new and rapacious Wall Street designed in the “Greed is good” 80s-era punishes markets that might be profitable, but not explosive. And as such, we’re continually propelled forward in this cancerous cycle of “How do we grow? How do we grow?” – even with markets that might be more profitable if they stopped focusing on growth and instead focused on satisfying a small but rabid client base.
In a sane economy, Twitter could pause and say, “Okay, we’ve got all these people who love us – so our priorities should be a) to figure out how to make a good profit from these folks, and b) make the people who love us love us more.” (The two are not inevitably linked – users would love you most if there were no ads involved, but users are often very stupid people who get angry at your attempts to draw a salary.)
But because Wall Street demands SWELL AND EXPAND, what we get from Twitter is this muddled confusion of “Okay, yeah, our users want better anti-abuse tools” (which is critical because, as this Tweet explains, Twitter is the only social network where “being successful” means “you get abused”) and yet they’re pouring resources into “Stuff that people who don’t like Twitter might like.”
Which is something that makes me feel sad for Twitter’s people. In a better world, they’d be focused on “What do Twitter users enjoy about us?” And they’d understand that question really well, and make a product suited for a comparatively stable user base.
Instead, we get Twitter programmers who are shocked by what happens on Twitter when a Tweet goes viral.
And I think Twitter’s not alone. Lots of America is shaped by this relentless Wall Street command that you must expand and be profitable now. Your infrastructure? Doesn’t matter. Your R&D? Fuck that, did you make a profit this quarter? Your long-term plans for steady growth? Consumed in this blaze of GIMME CASH IMMEDIATELY. Your boring lumber business? Well, will you sell wood to ten billion people? NOT INTERESTED.
Personally, I think America would be a lot better if Wall Street was less full of greedy cancerous fuckwits willing to destroy companies so long as they get a paycheck today, and more populated with people who understood that businesses have different needs, and some unsexy businesses can make steady profits without funding yachts filled with cocaine-encrusted hookers.
Until then?
We get Twitter. Spasming in confusion, not doing well, beholden to two masters.
Slowly dying.
When The Obsession Works
I have a lot of rules around my polyamory – rules instigated mostly by my wife and long-term partner.
But they’re good rules.
See, I obsess about things and can’t stop. So when a relationship goes south, it’s all I can think about. I’m in the shower, wondering how I could have said things better. I’m at the movies, but I’m not watching, I’m contemplating my next text to her. I’m cuddled up with my wife and I love being there but she notes that crease in my forehead that signals that somewhere, I’m still wondering, how can I fix my relationship with this other woman?
So they said, “Okay, we need rules to ensure you date more stable women.” And I said “That sounds great,” because when you’re dating five women and two of those relationships are slowly disintegrating and you’re obsessive, well, it feels like running a goddamned marathon.
But.
But.
Right now, I’m in the process of revising a book, and the third act needs to be broken down and completely rewritten to take this book from “Acceptable ending” to “Awesome finish.” To properly rebreak an act, you have to be willing to slaughter every darling – yeah, these individual character moments are heartwarming, these plot twists are great, but what happens if we get rid of them? What happens if I take the entire last act, pretend it didn’t happen, and regrow a new last act like a lizard regenerating a severed limb?
I walked the dog this morning. I think. What actually happened was that the dog tugged me around the block while I examined all the elements in my book and weighed them and proposed theories, and I was back at my doorstep and barely registered the mile’s journey.
I’m unsure whether I’ll be able to fix this book properly – and please don’t tell me “You got this, Ferrett!” because I read that strongly as “If you can’t pull this off, we will come to hate you.”
But if I fail, it won’t be for lack of effort. I feel battered as a moth against a lightbulb, and I’ve only been contemplating this for two days – and I know I’ll spend the next weeks mired in this until I restructure it into something more perfect, or at least more fitting, because I don’t know how to stop.
Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can take your native neuroses and repurpose them into something productive. I won’t say I’m happy while I’m rebreaking Act Three, but if I manage to fix it then I’ll have utilized some pretty terrible instincts to create good art.
Much better than trying to repurpose a relationship. The odds are better, anyway.
What I Like About Robert Bennett's CITY OF STAIRS and CITY OF BLADES
So most of these crumbled civilizations are real shitholes, right? Years ago, there were Great Empires and everything’s gone to shit since then and there’s a bunch of farmers eking out an existence in the ruins.
Well, in Robert Jackson Bennett’s City of Stairs and City of Blades, those ancient civilizations exist. Except the today-civilizations are pretty much us, a hundred or so years ago. There are scientists who study things, and politicians who are frighteningly smart at taking advantage of situations, and nations who are fully rebuilt and functional. You wouldn’t mind living in his cities. They’re troubled, but they’re on the move.
The problem is that the Great Empires were founded by Divinities – literal Gods, who warped the flow of physics and created the impossible. One of the reasons the current nation-states are building their way out is because once the Gods died, the laws their cities ran on also vanished, and so they collapsed or sank into the sea or disintegrated in an event called The Blink.
And in both books – no real spoilers here – the heroes run across remnants of the Divine. (Usually because, like Scooby Doo investigating a haunted amusement park, the scientists of the day just can’t stop hunting for shit that does literal magic.) And when the heroes find the Divine, they have all the technology that people in the early twentieth century would have access to, they have all the cleverness that you or I would have, they are smart and insightful and clever…
And the echo of a Divinity is enough to almost destroy them, even with all of modern civilization backing them.
And I like that. I like that the past civilization is, effectively, science-fiction – and it’s not that humans are dumb or degraded, we’re still really clever, it’s that the Divinities were actually that terrifying in their heyday. And given that the Divinities were insane, you really don’t want ’em back.
They’re good books. You should check ’em out.
My New Nails! Shiny And Chrome! (Sorta)
Like all good nerds, I loved Mad Max: Fury Road. So when I asked my Mad Manicurist Ashley to do me up some Mad Max nails, we…
Ran into some issues.
She’d never seen Fury Road, and trying to explain to her “Yes, teeth spray-painted chrome is a major icon of the film and need to be on my nails” went over pretty poorly, with her going, “What? Why would that be a thing?” And in the end, thanks to some technical difficulties where she just started doing art deco (not really a Mad Max style), I got what are pretty nails – but nails I have to explain to people, because they’re not iconic:
Ashley’s nails are always amazing, but this is sadly at the bottom tier of amazing. Oh well. There’s always more nails.
And though I posted a small video, I’m not sure if I ever posted my Star Wars nails – which were very amazing, and I was ridiculously sad to have to take them off my body!
